Word: aly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Miserable little Qatar (pop. 35,000), a sun-seared knuckle of sand and stone jutting into the Persian Gulf, was a latecomer in the Middle East oil boom. But when oil poured out in 1949 and the gold started pouring in, wizened old (69) Sheik Ali bin Abdullah bin Qasim Al Thani had no trouble adjusting his spending habits to those of the other sheiks of Araby...
Cars for Jewels. Discovering Switzerland, Ali took to spending summers near the Alps to beat the heat (around 120° from April to October) at home. To get there, he chartered airliners for himself and his retinue, which was so large that it spilled out of the Sheik's palatial villa on the shores of Lake Geneva into hotels near by, where the damage to furnishings one season amounted to $20,000. And when the cool weather arrived up north, the whole entourage would flee across the Mediterranean to Ali's magnificent mansion on the heights above Beirut...
Foreign merchants awaited his trips with anticipation, for the aging Sheik was a generous man. When Saudi Arabia's King Saud went to Qatar for a royal visit laden with gifts in the form of bags of precious stones, Sheik Ali reciprocated by presenting Saud with 16 automobiles, one with gold fittings...
...Ali's generosity grew, so did his debts (about $14 million at last count) with Doha's local bankers; he just could not make ends meet, even though he got $12.5 million from Qatar's $50 million annual oil revenue. Soon Qatar's anxious bankers were backing young (30) Sheik Khalifa bin Hamad, Ali's nephew, who thought he was in line for the throne, and was pressing the old man to step down. The British, who watch over Qatar as a protectorate, took a hand when they detected signs of simmering insurrection among...
Next day Hussein told a press conference that "responsible authorities in the United Arab Republic, mainly in Syria," knew in advance of the plot to assassinate Majali. As long ago as last spring, the Jordanian government accused young Playboy General Ali Abu Nuwar, 38, Hussein's onetime buddy as army chief of staff, of planning Majali's assassination from his exile in Nasser's Damascus...